


A Moth's Threnody for a Caterpillar

by MistyBeethoven



Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [70]
Category: The Night Before (1988)
Genre: Astronomy, Bugs & Insects, Butterflies, Caterpillars, Childhood Friends, F/M, First Kiss, Growing Apart, Growing Up, Growing Up Together, High School, Kissing, Late at Night, Libraries, Melancholy, Moths, Overweight, Pining, Popularity, Prom, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Transformation, Unrequited Love, Weight Issues, changing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26537203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven
Summary: Growing up best friends with a nearby neighbor called Winston Connelly, I am saddened when he begins to date Tara Mitchell and changes from the boy I loved into a stranger. Before Winston leaves for college, I am able to tell him of my love for what I call "nighttime butterflies" and show him how much he meant to me.
Relationships: Winston Connelly (The Night Before)/Me, Winston Connelly/Tara Mitchell (The Night Before)
Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [70]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589944
Kudos: 5





	A Moth's Threnody for a Caterpillar

**Author's Note:**

> I truly enjoyed "The Night Before."
> 
> It was funny.
> 
> I'm not sure why this turned out so melancholy then.
> 
> Oh wait. I do know how.
> 
> I wasn't sure I'd get the chance to publish anything today. I'd planned on updating my "Man of Tai Chi" fic but then my sister heard that the dog she walks for a neighbor is being put to sleep tomorrow. Writing was put on hold; she comes first. She just started walking Caleb a year ago a little while after we lost a cat we both loved. This just seems so unfair to her to have to face this now too. Sometimes life just seems like a string of jokes with cruel punchlines. Ones you only ever laugh at because you're hysterical.
> 
> To be honest, I was heartbroken too about it. I didn't see the little doggy everyday but I loved him. And the last time I saw him I told him that I'd see him again...
> 
> I found some free time to write though, after all. 
> 
> New fics weren't really on my schedule but the night before I saw a moth on my night light. I thought of how much I have always loved them possibly more than butterflies. When the light was turned off, the moth proceeded to fly into my hair oddly enough. Then this fic started to formulate fully.
> 
> So thinking of moths, and how life seems to be a series of losses, the whole story came together. Because the sad fact is that we don't lose everybody we love to death.
> 
> Sometimes they slip away for other reasons.

I had spent most of my childhood and teenage years hopelessly in love with Winston Connelly.

He lived a few houses down from me and in our loneliness and states of alienation we had found each other in an attempt to try to save us from the pain being ignored will often cause. He was too smart for his own good, while I was too fat and shy for mine. My temperment suited his and he suffered my presence, basking in the fact that he had found someone to talk to about the stars, the planets, space or any other subject which interested him and he believed he could educate me on. Often I would listen until my head was spinning with too many facts and I would place two fingers over his lips, telling the boy that my ears were all spent. Always, I would still feel his lips begin to move under my chubby fingertips for a few seconds, knowing he still wished to talk. Then he would read on my face that I was being left behind and could not catch up to him and he would stop and let me digest what he had already been said.

Sometimes we had sat at night in his backyard and while he was talking about space and preparing to show me through his telescope his far away obsessions, I would focus instead on the moths swirling around the flashlight we had brought with us. I would see them and think how they were simply nighttime butterflies, deemed less beautiful than their daytime counterparts and thus resigned to the darkness for their sin.

Once I had collected a caterpillar to try to make it into a moth as a pet but Winston had shaken his head at me in almost parental disapproval. "You can never be sure if it will be a moth or a butterfly, Erin," he informed. "Although, if it was the latter it would be worth it!"

It had not taken long for me to fall in love with the boy. He was kind and smart and so completely teased at the school we both went to that my heart was given to him about the same time I had offered him the first Valentine I had ever given away where I actually meant the sentiment scribbled on it.

In high school we were still the best of friends, he and I; the class nerd and the fat girl whom secretly adored him. People used to assume we were dating, but while the idea always left me with a giddy euphoria it never lasted for too long when I would see how offended it would make Winston. One day, while we sat side by side in the cafeteria, he even asked me if he shouldn't have the school paper print up an announcement to clear up the fact.

I had only told him that people would still believe what they wanted to.

I think to help avert it, Winston began to spend more time with the astronomy club to avoid being seen with me. This backfired tremendously when, after trying to become the President of said club, he was made Vice President instead. Inevitably, it was my door that he came knocking on, crying on my shoulder in my bedroom because my mother was out of the house and I trusted that Winston unfortunately would not try anything with me.

Of course, as he was leaving late at night, people suspected that he and I had been having sex.

And, of course, to try to combat this, he had told everybody that nothing had gone on between he and I and that he was still a virgin. This only made everybody tease him even more relentlessly at school and left me wondering if he thought that this was better than being teased for having done it with a fat girl.

I was a moth to Winston Connelly and not a butterfly.

 _Tara Mitchell_ was his butterfly.

Tara was one of the many beautiful and popular girls that went to our school. She was friends with a girl named Lisa and together they walked the hallways, winning the attention of any heterosexual male in the vicinity, from football players, like her usual boyfriend, to the lowliest of nerds, like Winston Connelly.

I found myself praying just one thing: that Mitchell never opened her eyes and truly looked at the object of my affection.

I always knew that Winston Connelly was gorgeous. I knew that if he started dressing the way that everyone else did and talking that way too, it wouldn't be long before they knew it and accepted him as one of them.

A butterfly joining all the others in the daylight sun.

I, on the otherhand...

I was fat. You can't change something like that overnight. And I was shy, introverted and awkward too. There was something in my personality resilient to that type of change also. I could not change myself to please them. The thought was offensive to me.

I would always be a moth, having changed into the only thing I could ever be.

Meanwhile, Winston stayed a caterpillar unaware of the fact that if he wanted to, he could spin his cocoon and emerge one day as a butterfly. One which then could join the girl he spent his days pining for and his nights dreaming of.

I lived in fear of the day.

For then he wouldn't be my Winston.

* * *

"Erin, I'm going to the prom with Tara Mitchell!" Winston exclaimed one day after showing up at my window. The door had by then been out of the question after the Vice President fiasco. He was standing there infront of me, his face glowing, while I was sitting on the floor with a cloud of doom quickly forming over my head.

My heart dropped into my big toe at his words even though the look of pure happiness on his face made me want to smile with him. Winston's smiles were always like that: infectious. You couldn't see one without mirroring it and feeling genuinely happy yourself. They glowed. Seeing it now though only confused me. My heart did not know how to react.

"How did it happen?" I asked, going forward past my torn heart with a question instead, attempting to dissect an event which seemed perposterous and therefore in need of an explaination.

One that Winston seemed unable to give. "What does it matter _how_ it happened, Erin?" he asked, shaking his head and giving me another ecstatic smile, making me forgive him for his slightly condescending tone. "It did. That's all that matters!"

"That's great," I lied.

"I'm sorry though," he apologized without looking as if he meant it. "We won't be able to look at the stars that night like we planned."

"It's fine," I said, guilty of another lie. I had been looking forward to the plans we had made to rebel against the prom and star gaze.

Later on, I discovered that Tara Mitchell had only agreed to go out with Winston because she had lost a bet over football. Though it was going all over school, Winston played deaf to it. Basking in the joy of catching his butterfly in whatever net had allowed it.

I quickly wondered how a man with so much intelligence, could be so damn stupid.

* * *

Hope persists even when your last chance has flown off with the butterfly of his dreams.

The night of the prom, I kept waiting and hoping that maybe Winston would show up at my front door with that stupid little owl magnet he'd purchased for Tara and offer it to me instead. I'd just seen John Hughes "Some Kind of Wonderful" and it had filled my head with the wrong kind of ideas. I realized, as the night ended, Watts in that film was still beautiful and thin. She wasn't a Mama Cass.

I stayed up all night wondering what Winston Connelly was doing. I pictured everything even some possibilities that made me into a masochist.

However, nothing I could have imagined came anywhere close to the truth.

When I had heard that neither Winston and Tara had showed up at prom, I had at first been relieved. This feeling soon evaporated when I overheard why. It turned out Winston had gotten them lost in the bad part of town. He had somehow managed to sell his crush to a pimp, lost his father's car and then won both back again.

And Tara Mitchell's egotistical heart, as well.

During the next few days, I found myself wondering if it wouldn't have been better if Winston and Tara had arrived at the prom, after all. If they had, I could have pictured a few awkward dances between them, Winston remaining ignorant to his prom date's lack of enthusiasm while Tara would be so miserable she would eventually try to sneak away with a football player or some athletic jock. Instead, they had virtually found themselves in an offball, romantic, teen comedy, certainly not as thoughtful as a John Hughes film but not a bad adolescent variant of Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" either.

Only with a much _happier_ ending.

The thing about situations like that is they will sometimes draw people together. It puts the adrenaline up and because it feels like a movie the next logical step seems for two leads to fall in love and drive off in the sunset together. In this case, it was a fancy sports car.

Winston was too busy to tell me any of this himself. Soon inducted into Mitchell's world of popularity I was soon forgotten about. He no longer came to see me at my window nor would I receive hastily scribbled notes left in the mailbox, telling me about this planetary conjunction or a star he could have sworn he had seen falling through his telescope the night before.

Whenever, I caught of glimpse of him, he looked so different from the Winston I knew in his unhip clothing and with his intellectual air. He'd swapped his vests and shirts for a t-shirt and jacket. Gone were his black trousers, replaced by jeans that fit tight enough to let me see a vague outline of the part of his anatomy I had fantasized about but had only almost seen once when we'd gone swimming when we were thirteen and his trunks had fallen off.

He was still beautiful but he had lost something that had made him unique.

My caterpillar had finally turned into a butterfly and flown away from me, I knew with sorrow.

Whenever he caught a glimpse of me, Winston would look away now amost in embarrassment and I couldn't quite figure out if he was embarrassed in case I approached him and reminded everybody that he hadn't been a butterfly only a few days ago or if he was ashamed for having left me; turning into something that survived in the day rather than the night where he had once spent his time gazing up at the stars with me as the moths danced around us.

* * *

About a week before Winston was heading off to college, I stood at the front door of his house, knocking in hesitation. When Mrs. Connelly answered the door she looked at me with a frown for a second before she smiled.

"Why Erin," she said. "We haven't seen you for a while. How have you been?"

"Okay," I said, which was a lie. I had been far from okay since Winston had exchanged me for Tara Mitchell's company, just as Mrs. Connelly had replaced her piteous frown for a false smile. "Is Winston in?"

"Actually, yes," she commented. "You caught him in for a change." Her voice was thick with regret and I understood that she had been missing her son equally as much as I had been missing my best friend. She looked me over suddenly and I knew in her mind she was comparing my round body, adorned in only a Daffy Duck t-shirt and a pair of black pants with Tara Mitchell's svelte figure, one which was usually wearing the latest dress. Pity held fast in the older woman's eyes before she offered me the same smile, something she was only wearing out of compassion for her son's out of fashion friend. "I'll go get him," she said and left, seemingly grateful to get away.

It was a while before Winston showed up and I could picture in my head the argument he had had with his mother. He'd probably begged her to tell me he was sick and she had probably refused. The time attested to it, while the voices that had drifted down to me confirmed the fact further from their unpleasant tones. I had been about to walk away until the man appeared and looked at the chubby girl in the doorway with the same amount of shame he usually had specially reserved for me.

"Hi Erin," he said. "How have you been?"

 _"I've been missing you,"_ I wanted to reply to the rote question but instead only regurgitated the same lie I had told his mother: "Okay."

"So what's this about?" he asked, seemingly impatient.

"I have a book in at the library. Mom's away. Could you drive me there?"

"Is it really _that_ important?" he asked and I could see him measuring inside of his head the discomfort of having to drive me there and back.

I was about to answer "No," when his mother walked down the stairs behind him and coughed in irritation.

Winston looked back at me and frowned. "Okay," he replied. "Just let me get the keys."

* * *

The drive was uncomfortable. I was close to tears because the driver would barely look at me and his conversation was stilted and unsure. One thing Winston had never been before was shy around me or still of tongue. He enjoyed telling me about everything and _anything_. Now he could barely find five words to string together.

At the library, Winston came in too while I went to fetch my book. "Tara said I should check out a book. So while I'm here..." he said, climbing out of the car. It was the most he had said to me the whole drive so I was only mildly upset he'd mentioned his new girlfriend.

We walked up the library stairs like some divorced couple rather than the best friends we used to be.

Getting my book was easy enough. They had it waiting at the front desk. I waited by the doors for Winston to come out and when he did, the book he had checked out was hidden under his arm on the opposite side so I could not see the title. Only when we were walking down the steps it fell out from underneath his arm and I could easily read the title as it lay on the step:

_**"Joy of Sex".** _

He ran down the stairs to pick it up hastily. I looked at the book in my own hands: Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" and felt horribly childish. Walking down the stairs, I cursed myself for reserving the book about an hour before as an excuse to spend some time with Winston Connelly.

* * *

On the drive back home, it was dark and I stared out the window, mad at myself and mad at Winston and Tara.

I had wanted to be his first not some girl whom had only gone to the prom with him because of a lost bet.

I had wanted him to be _my_ first time too.

While the second was still possible, I could pretty well guess that the first one was not. It was just one more dream to die, like hoping that I'd be magically thin by the time I turned eighteen or that Winston would then be proud to take me to the prom. So many dreams and wishes died as you grew older. It seemed sometimes like all you ever were doing was losing the things you had been blessed to find.

"So are you going to college, Erin?" Winston asked, his hand on the wheel and looking tense.

"You know mom can't afford it," I reminded him.

"I thought maybe that art scholarship had..."

"No," I said. "It didn't."

"I'm sorry," he apologized and it seemed genuine, to his credit.

"Is Tara going to the same college as you?" I asked.

"No," Winston replied. "She's staying here while I go East."

The information made me happy until he added, "That's why we have to spend all our time together."

Frowning, I asked, "Are you still majoring in physics?"

Silence as he shifted in his seat.

"You are, _right_?" I asked. Winston had spent all his life wanting to become an astronomer. To think that he'd change even that upset me.

"No," he eventually replied. "Tara thinks it would be best if I went into medical science."

I exhaled in anger.

"What?" Winston turned and asked me in annoyance, as if placing all of his frustration over the situation on me and not where it should have been directed.

I was about to get mad at him for changing then and unleash my own irritation and pain over having been abandoned when the car interrupted by making a few odd sounds and then dying. "Shit," Winston said pulling over by a street lamp and hitting the wheel. "I had a date with Tara tonight. Me and driving at night do _not_ get along."

"Sorry," I apologized falsely.

Winston got out of the car to examine it and I joined him after a few seconds, leaving Dickens on the dashboard next to the sex manual. Winston was looking under the hood which he slammed shut. He looked around but saw nothing around us where a phone would be readily available. I gently grabbed his arm in comfort. "A patrol car should be by soon."

Winston looked at me as if my touch only made him uncomfortable and the pain I felt was enough to break my heart. I immediately sat on the hood of the car next to where my former friend was standing. It was hot under my bottom but not unbearable and I looked at the street lamp while Winston hopped up on the hood and sat reluctantly by my side.

In the light, I could see several moths flying around and I suddenly felt as if I was eight years old again in the Connolley's backyard looking at stars as moths came to give their adoration to the flashlight we had brought as our substitute moon.

"When we were kids I loved moths," I told my pouting companion. "I loved their cute fuzzy bodies, their large black eyes and those crazy antennas. They were so delicate to the touch too...I used to feel so bad when one would land on me and I hurt it without meaning to...they seem to be made of powder almost or moonlight...you can't hold their wings, the small ones. You can wound them so easily. People always loved butterflies but I loved moths because they all seemed so different in their ways and just as special. If it was only the night that accepted them well it never mattered: To me they were only nighttime butterflies."

I suddenly turned from instinct and placed two fingers over Winston Connelly's mouth, expecting to receive a lecture on how incorrect my beliefs on the two flying insects were. It was only when his lips did not move and I knew no informative lesson on the differences between butterflies and moths was coming that overwgelming sadness hit me and I knew the action was all wrong.

I wanted Winston to talk to me like he used to. But that Winston Connelly had transformed already and flown away from me.

My Winston had died.

I held back a sob then, taking my hand away from his lips, which were soft and full, to hold myself on the hood of the car which seemed too flashy for my childhood friend but fit in perfectly with the adult stranger sitting by my side. I wanted nothing more than for him to take me home then but the car wasn't working so I had to stay with a man I no longer recognized, other than the look in his eyes which said he had failed to completely understand me as I'd have liked him too.

"I like caterpillars," I stated, turning away. "That strange way they feel when they crawl on your skin...the cute furry body and the pretty colors. I like their faces...sometimes I feel sad that they have to _change_ ," I said. "I don't see what was wrong with them to begin with."

"Things change," Winston said. "They evolve to survive."

"Not always for the better," I grieved.

We both saw a cop car approaching and looked at it and then at each other in pain. "There's one thing I remember a boy teaching me about caterpillars..." I said as Winston hopped down. "He told me that you never know what a caterpillar will be: a moth or a butterfly. You know, I think maybe, in the end, _they_ decide."

Winston Connelly turned back to look at me. He seemed on the precipice of saying some words that would save or damn me but then shut his mouth as the cop opened the patrol car door.

* * *

Outside of my house, Winston parked the car the policeman had managed to jump start on the highway. He would not look at me and only mumbled a goodbye. I knew then that human butterflies did not speak the language of human moths. If only because they would not _listen_.

To make him, I grabbed his dirty book and exited the car with it.

"ERIN!" he shouted in anger while I climbed out of the car.

We looked at each other over the vehicle before I walked towards him in feigned defeat. Glaring at me, the man whom had once been a dweeb grabbed the book from my hands. I met his eyes in defiance, spurned on by the light of the moon. "I was never smart as you, Winston Connelly," I stated boldly. "But there is one thing I know...if two people need a sex manual to help them make love then maybe they aren't really in love at all."

His eyes widening in embarrassment, I gave my first kiss to Winston Connelly, taking him by surprise with the love and passion I was finally confessing to him in action and not in words. Instead of pulling back, the man fell into the kiss and finally my embrace. His hands went to my back as my own were wrapped around his. It was the kiss I had always wanted, hungry and full of desire and yet with a core of sweetness which was born of what we had meant to each other once upon a time and what he _still_ remained to me.

When we had parted, Winston Connelly was looking at me as if he had never _truly_ seen me before.

However, I slowly backed away from him and then ran towards my house, showing him that nightime butterflies could fly away quickly too.

Especially when the light they had once adored had lost its special glow.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Keanu;
> 
> This week I was the most saddened I have been since beginning this series. Although, I've always been upset I never receive as many hits or kudos as other fanfics here, I never really felt close to quitting nor did I feel that I was only wasting my time and had embarrassed myself.
> 
> This week I did though. 
> 
> One of the comments I have received stated that I wasn't pathetic but brave. But, this week, I didn't feel brave. 
> 
> I felt like a stupid, little fool.
> 
> You see, I continue writing because I believed in these stories and that you would like at least one of them. That's my hope. It's foolish to think you will even see them but hope is a good thing although it can hurt sometimes. Then something happened and I felt hopeless that you actually would. 
> 
> This was the first week I felt that you would not like these stories nor would you like me. And that pretty well devastated me.
> 
> That has never ever happened before. Doubt, yeah sure...but absolute conviction? Never.
> 
> I've written over 600000 words in less than a year, over 50 characters in over 60 fics. It seemed like a horrible thing to have put so much heart into something for someone that would not enjoy them. Or maybe would just fake that they would. I don't want pity and I don't want a condescending "Isn't she sweet." In writing these, I want to touch your heart as much as you have touched mine. But recently I didn't believe that I could ever do that.
> 
> Two readers made me feel better, however. Mystictopaz6293 and MoonCrone offered me sweet, genuine words and that helped me out and I cannot thank them enough. 
> 
> I will continue because I do think the world of you, Mr. Reeves and if I don't want to put words in your mouth, well, I shouldn't put thoughts in your head or feelings in your heart either.
> 
> Still, maybe this story's sadness is influenced by the pain of all that from this week too. It is a story of mourning and loss for someone still living and dreams that have died, after all.
> 
> I experienced that once already and you helped me with it.
> 
> Still much love,  
> Erin  
> XO XO  
> :D <3


End file.
